Osama bin Laden was hiding in plain sight in affluent suburb of Pakistan

AP Photo/Al JazeeraOsama bin Laden is seen at an undisclosed location in this television image broadcast in this Oct. 7, 2001 file photo.

Ghost-like, Osama bin Laden traveled relentlessly across the mountainous terrain of northern Pakistan eluding capture for nearly a decade by hiding in caves and moving frequently, so most Americans believed.

The fact that the world’s most-wanted mass murderer was shot and killed by U.S. forces today in Abbottabad, Pakistan, an affluent suburb in a lush, picturesque valley popular with tourists, has turned the assumptions and predictions of most Americans and many military analysts upside down.

It turns out the 54-year-old bin Laden was hiding virtually in the open — and in comfort — for months, if not years, experts said today.

Since the attacks of 9/11, there have been dozens of videos and audiotaped messages from bin Laden, but few actual sightings of the terrorist leader. The trail had gone cold, said counter-terrorism experts. You cannot kill what you cannot catch, and you cannot catch what you cannot find.

But if the reason was that bin Laden was spending all his time evading capture, then all the better.

"Look, it’s hard to plan, plot and attack if you’re running or hiding in a cave," said then-president George W. Bush in October 2006.

BY THE NUMBERS:

$444B — Money appropriated for the war in Afghanistan

$3B — Approximate amount of U.S. covert support for Soviet-Afghanistan conflict between 1981 and 1991, when bin Laden gained prominence.

$30M to $300M — Osama bin Laden’s estimated inheritance, though much of that has probably been spent funding al Qaeda

$25M — FBI reward for information leading directly to the apprehension or conviction of bin Laden

2 — Known number of weeks bin Laden spent visiting in the U.S. in 1979.

Finding Osama was a puzzle American operatives and allied agents couldn’t solve. He was in a cave or a small adobe hut. He was in the Swat Valley, in Dir Valley, or in the Hindu Kush mountains.

As recently as last year, American and Pakistani intelligence reports placed bin Laden in the Waziristan tribal area in the rural reaches of Pakistan’s northwestern frontier where the difficulties of capturing or killing the terrorist leader were considered daunting.

The altitude, some 10,000 to 16,000 feet above sea level, meant helicopters were restricted by the thin air and oxygen is a requirement of any attacking force. Snow-bound winters would also make bin Laden’s probable hideout impossible to reach for months at a time, and the thousands of deep caves in the region meant he also could move around at will.

In 2000, Arthur Keller, a CIA officer who once ran a spy network in Pakistan’s tribal areas, told a journalist bin Laden was certainly being protected there by zealous followers: "It’s an incredibly remote area. They’re hiding in a sea of people that are very xenophobic of outsiders, so it’s a very, very tough nut to crack."

Instead, Abbottabad is just 4,000 feet above sea level and situated in the green Orash valley where the climate is temperate all year round. The well-to-do, bustling suburb, about 60 miles from the Pakistan capital of Islamabad, is spotted with cricket fields and field hockey stadiums as well as several institutions of higher learning, including an elite military academy. And the compound where he was shot, is just 800 feet from the town’s police station.

While bin Laden remained the titular head and spiritual leader of al Qaeda, many in the counter-terrorism community believed he was no longer running al Qaeda’s day-to-day operations. Some, in fact, believed he might even be dead, especially since Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s president, claimed in 2002 that bin Laden was suffering from kidney failure and required regular dialysis treatment.

At least a half-dozen times since 9/11 there were reports from official sources of bin Laden’s demise: He succumbed to lung disease, massive organ failure, typhoid fever or perhaps was murdered by a rival.

Most, however, believed he was alive and watching as, one by one, top al Qaeda operatives were captured or killed over the past several years.

Still, bin Laden remained defiant.

In 2004, he urged Iraquis to boycott elections and named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi his top deputy in Iraq.

Two years later, he said the United States and Europe were waging "a Zionist crusader war on Islam."

And in December 2007, in a tape-recorded message, he warned Iraq’s Sunni Arabs not to join in the fight against al Qaeda and also called for attacks on Israel, with the threat of "blood for blood, destruction for destruction."

Bin Laden’s transformation from the pampered son of a wealthy Saudi father to an Islamic militant has been well chronicled, but personal insight into his character has been difficult to come by.

Journalist Peter Bergen, who once interviewed bin Laden, wrote a book in 2007 that uncovered small, intriguing details, most of them provided by bin Laden’s former friends and colleagues.

As a young man, the future terrorist leader was shy and liked westerns and Kung Fu movies, according to one childhood friend. Christina Akerblad, the former owner of Sweden’s Hotel Astoria, remembered bin Laden and his older brother Salem visiting in 1970 and being driven around in a chauffeured Rolls Royce. Their bags, she told Bergen, were packed with expensive shirts by designers Christian Dior and Yves St. Laurent, which they wore just once, then discarded.

Yet even as a teenager, said his friends, bin Laden was devout, praying seven times a day and fasting twice a week.

Radicalized by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, home to Islam’s holy cities of Medina and Mecca, bin Laden "became more assertive and less shy" said his childhood companion Khalid Batarfi in Bergen’s 2006 book, "The Osama Bin Laden I Know."

After founding a group called the Maktab al Khidmat, or Bureau of Services, which sought to recruit fighters to the war against the Soviets, bin Laden established a network of terrorist cells in Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and even the United States.

Paramilitary training camps were also set up in the early 90s and bin Laden used his fundraising and an inheritance of $1 million a year to establish businesses and more bases in Sudan.

Bin Laden’s vision of a global Islamic army was taking shape and in December 1992 he launched his war on the West by bombing the port city of Aden, Yemen, which was used as a staging area by U.S. troops en route to Somalia. It is believed by U.S. intelligence agents to be the first terrorist attack by bin Laden and al Qaeda.

Two months later, a handful of Islamic extremists drove a Ryder rental truck loaded with 1,500 pounds of explosives into a basement parking area under the World Trade Center in New York City, set the timer, and fled.

Six people died in the explosion and more than a thousand were injured.